The Winnemucca Police Department (WPD) takes every call seriously—especially those involving children. On Sat., Jan. 6, the WPD received a call from an individual claiming to not only be suicidal, but also claiming to have two children with them. WPD officers exhausted all efforts, technological and old school, over 42 hours to try to find the individual and the children, but the caller refused to give them any information that would help officers to find them.
Despite their best efforts, the supposed victim and the children were never located and it was never even determined if the individual actually exists. As of Jan.8, the information has been turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), according to WPD Lieutenant Jeff Murdock.
Murdock explained that the individual sent three photos of two small children to the WPD, trying to convince the officers that they were with them. The WPD then used facial recognition software to try to identify the children but they were unsuccessful. The individual also used a phone that would not allow the WPD to trace their location.
WPD Sergeant Danny Klaussen spoke with the individual for over seven hours, asking for the individual’s location and then having officers dispatched to the location to run sirens to see if they could be heard in the background, but none were ever heard.
Murdock also said that as soon as the WPD enlisted the public’s help on Facebook,with over 1,000 shares on the post in two days, they never heard from the individual again. The WPD received calls from as far away as San Francisco with potential information, but none of the leads panned out.
“It leads us to believe it’s a hoax because if you want help, we offered every help in the world with no repercussions, no harm, and they refused to do it, but they would continue to call and talk to a cop but not in a way that we can help them so we could never verify that this person was who we thought they might be. We could never find anything to even prove they were in Winnemucca. Anything that they told us can be found on the internet,” explained Murdock.
Why would someone do such a thing? It’s likely that no one will ever know and although it was a major waste of time and demoralizing to the officers, the community showed tremendous effort to help the WPD try to identify and locate the person and children.
“Even though this is discouraging to us, for this to not be legitimate, we are also thankful that it’s not. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t call the cops. We’re here to help and we’re gonna give everybody 100 percent on whatever calls that we get,” said Murdock.